How to Track Offline Marketing Campaigns

The marketers strive to spend money on the advertising on the billboards, vehicle wraps, TV, radio, and booklets when having enough budget. However, offline advertising is usually expensive. The measurement of offline marketing success seems to be a tough task. How to see where the highest engagement is coming from? Which advertising channel is the most effective?

To determine the efficiency of your online marketing efforts, you commonly use Google Analytics or similar tools. However, things are different with offline advertising. Let’s find out how you can track where your customers are coming from.

The Method №1 The question “How did you hear about us?”

According to this method, sales managers ask this question and add customers’ answers to the spreadsheets or CRM system. Then they manually measure advertising effectiveness.

Pros

• It’s free.
• You don’t need additional analytics tools.

Cons

• This question annoys about 20% of customers. Moreover, half of the clients usually don’t remember how they heard about the company.
• Client can answer that he heard about you in the newspaper. And what if you advertised in a few newspapers? How to determine which one brought customers? Put it simply, this method doesn’t provide with accurate results.
• Sales managers can forget to ask this question or ask it more than once by mistake.

The Method №2 Bring the booklet and get the discount

This method is pretty old. The customer shows the booklet or something else with advertising and gets the discount.

Pros

• It’s inexpensive.
• You don’t need additional analytics tools.

Cons

• Thus, you may determine the effectiveness of only one marketing channel.
• Prospects are annoyed with people who hand out booklets.
• Manual calculation and filling in spreadsheets require many efforts.

The Method №3 Coupon codes

Many companies are familiar with this way of tracking offline promotions. When showing specific coupon code, a customer gets a discount. There are two kinds of these coupon codes:

1. Promo codes consist of numbers and letters.
2. QR codes are rectangular barcodes that can be scanned by smartphones.

There are some services that allow to create promo code, type it on the website, and connect to advertising source. I’ll give you the example of IfTheyCall.

1. IfTheyCall script generates a promo code.
2. Client leaves this code on the website.
3. When receiving an incoming call, sales manager asks a client to tell this code.
4. Then manager puts this code in IfTheyCall account.
5. It provides with data on which ad sources generated calls.

Also, a manager can enter this data into CRM or another specific tool. As result, it allows to track which advertising brought orders. This also works if your customers didn’t call but visited a shop to buy goods.

Pros

• You get more accurate data on where your customers are coming from.

Cons

• Customers have to keep in mind the specific code.
• It requires many sales rep’s efforts.
• When watching TV or listening to the radio, a client can not have time to write down a promo code.

The Method №4 Call Tracking

Self-made call tracking

You buy a few sim-cards and smartphones and specify different phone numbers for each ad campaign. Sales reps have to write down the phone numbers of customers and connect them to ad sources. Then you may make out reports based on this info.

Pros

• You don’t need additional analytics tools.

Cons

• It requires constant attention and may lead to data inaccuracy.
• You spend extra costs on sim-cards and smartphones.

Professional call tracking

That’s a service provided by certain companies. There are a few types of call tracking. The static (source-based) one is the most suitable for offline advertising. In static call tracking, a phone number is assigned to a certain visitor source. Companies may rent phone numbers or activate their own. After this, a first phone number is assigned to the billboard, the second one to the newspaper, the third one to TV etc.

When a client calls the phone number, a call tracking service collects the data on ad source he came from. Then this info can be transferred to other web analytics services for the detailed analysis. Thus, call tracking users can see on Google Analytics reports how many calls were generated by a certain offline campaign.

Moreover, a call tracking service includes a virtual PBX. That allows to effectively process calls and track the performance of the sales department. Unlike aforementioned methods, the additional benefit is the call forwarding to other sales reps when someone can’t answer an incoming phone call.

Another advantage is that’s easy to determine the effectiveness of each advertising channel with a consideration of phone calls. By integrating call tracking with CRM system, you can discover other great opportunities.

Pros

• This method automates tracking of offline market campaigns and provides with the accurate data.
• It allows to track a performance of the sales department and reduce the number of missed calls. Call tracking system collects data on phone call length and other important metrics. Moreover, you can listen to call recordings.
• It gives an opportunity to determine the best time for advertising on TV and radio.

Cons

• Additional spending on analytics tool.

Have a look at the last one benefit. Call analytics services provide the information on how many calls the company receives for the specific period. It helps determine a call center volume by time of theday and day of the week. Here’s the example of such report. To learn more about its opportunities, read our blog post.

Jonh Wanamaker is credited with coining the quote “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.” The point is if you can’t measure the effectiveness of your offline marketing efforts, you can’t improve it. You can’t prove it worked either. With that in mind, whatever tracking method you choose, pay attention to different metrics, make conclusions and get success.